Some poems by Henry Dumas

Knees of a Natural Man (for Jay Wright)

my ole man took me to the fulton fish market
we walk around in the guts and the scales

my ole man show me a dead fish, eyes like throat spit
he say “you hongry boy?” i say “naw, not yet”

my ole man show me how to pick the leavings
he say people throw away fish that not rotten

we scaling on our knees back uptown on lenox
sold five fish, keepin one for the pot

my ole man copped a bottle of wine
he say, “boy, build me a fire out in the lot”

backyard cat climbin up my leg for fish
i make a fire in the ash can

my ole man come when he smell fish
frank williams is with him, they got wine

my ole man say “the boy cotch the big one”
he tell big lie and slap me on the head

i give the guts to the cat and take me some wine
we walk around the sparks like we in hell

my ole man is laughin and coughin up wine
he say “you hongry boy” i say “naw, not yet”

next time i go to fulton fish market
first thing i do is take a long drink of wine

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America

If an eagle be imprisoned
On the back of a coin
And the coin is tossed into the sky,
That coin will spin,
That coin will flutter,
But the eagle will never fly.

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Thought

Love came to me and said:
What do you want of me?
Save me I said, Save me.
Love knelt down beside me
and love said:
If you knew the price
of coming to you,
you would ask nothing
but would give.

————————————————————

Love Song

Beloved,
I have to adore the earth:

The wind must have heard
your voice once.
It echoes and sings like you.

The soil must have tasted
you once.
It is laden with your scent.

The trees honor you
in gold
and blush when you pass.

I know why the north country
is frozen.
It has been trying to preserve
your memory.

I know why the desert
burns with fever.
It has wept too long without you.

On hands and knees,
the ocean begs up the beach,
and falls at your feet.

I have to adore
the mirror of the earth.
You have taught her well
how to be beautiful.

————————————————————

Play Ebony Play Ivory

play ebony play ivory
play chords that
speak primeval
play ebony play ivory
play notes that
speak my people…

play ebony play ivory
play til air explodes
play til it subsides
play ebony play ivory.

for the songless, the dead
who rot the earth
all these dead,
whose muted sour tongues
speak broken chords,
all these aging people
poison the heart of earth.

they cannot sing
they cannot play
they cannot breathe the early rhythm
they never heard the pulse of womb

so up! you bursting lungs
you spirits of morning breath
up! and make fingers
and play long and play soft
play ebony play ivory.

play my people
all my people who breathe
the breath of earth
all my people who are keys and chords…

now touch
and hear and see
let your lungs scream
til they explode
til blood subsides
and flesh vibrates…
make chords that speak
play long play soft
play ebony play ivory
play ebony
play ivory

I’m in the Chemical Valley (the Number of Eyes Vary)

I look out and canyons of calamity
stretch up towards me,
because I am here for but a blink in the grand scheme,
but my waste products will witness the dance of the stones
and the changing ground that
will eventually no longer bear our feet.
The packaging of my life
may get a glimpse of eternity.
An outline of this body
and all the souls consumed by me, me, me.

Even still,
it’s always my present predicament.
I’m over being strung out on sentiment.
What of the way the river dances?
I celebrate every hour of this day
like each chime of the clock
is my own personal Christmas.

“Perhaps he has heard a warning of someone’s death,
a strange noise, a shriek on the roof.
Perhaps a man has passed him in the open road
and disappeared suddenly, leaving no tracks…
Always there is some souvenir of the spirit-world

Bite the head off the first butterfly you see,
and you will get a new dress.

Take seven hairs from a blood snake,
seven scales from a rattlesnake,
seven bits of feathers from an owl –
boil for seven minutes over a hot fire
in the first rainwater caught in April.

Still,
there it is.”

“The Enforcement of Mosaic Law

To Be Square with the Sun at Noon, STAND STILL and Consider the Wonderous Work of God

The center of attention in a Calvinist meetinghouse was the pulpit from which the minister preached. New England historian Alice Morse Earle remembered that “the pulpit of one old unpainted church retained until the middle of this [nineteenth] century, as its sole decoration, an enormous, carefully painted, staring eye, a terrible and suggestive illustration to youthful wrong-doers of the great all-seeing eye of God.”

Outside, the walls were rough unpainted clapboards. On them were nailed the bounty-heads of wolves with dark crimson bloodstains below. The doors were covered with tattered scraps of faded paper which told of intended marriages, provincial proclamations, sales of property, and sometimes rude insults in which one disgruntled townsman denounced another.

Inside, most meetinghouses had no ornaments except that terrible staring eye—no paint, no curtains, no plaster, no pictures, no lights—nothing to distract the congregation from the spoken word.

Frozen communion bread, frostbitten fingers, baptisms performed with chunks of ice and entire congregations with chattering teeth that sounded like a field of crickets.

Sometimes they dressed in rags and smeared streaks of dirt upon their faces to deepen their humiliation. Occasionally, they were compelled literally to crawl before the congregation.

The meetinghouses of New England were often set high on a commanding hilltop. Roxbury’s aged minister John Eliot was heard to say as he climbed meetinghouse hill on the arm of a townsman, “This is very like the way to heaven; ‘tis uphill.

This Ritual of Worship Became a Powerful Instrument

At the end of a New England service a psalm was sung, if singing is the word to describe the strange cacophony that rose from a Puritan congregation. Here again, the emphasis was on words rather than music. The psalm would be begun with a line by a member of the congregation. Then each individual “took the run of the tune” without common tempo, pitch or scale. One observer wrote in 1720, “ … everyone sang as best pleased himself.” Another described the effect as a “horrid medley of confused and disorderly noises.” Strangers were astounded by the noise, which carried miles across the quiet countryside. But New Englanders were deeply moved by this “rote singing” as it was called, and strenuously resisted efforts to improve it. The result was a major controversy in the eighteenth century between what was called “rote singing” and “note singing.”

Much later, Harriet Beecher Stowe remembered that “the rude and primitive singing in our old meeting house always excited me powerfully. It brought over me, like a presence, the sense of the infinite and the eternal, the yearning and the fear and the desire of the poor finite being, as if walking on air, with the final words of the psalm floating like an illuminated cloud around me.

Afterwards, how ghostly and supernatural the stillness of the whole house and village outside the meeting-house used to appear to me, how loudly the clock ticked and the flies buzzed down the window-pane, and how I listened in the breathless stillness to the distant wind, the solemn tones of the cattle in the field, and then to the monotone of the lamp burning, and then again to the closing echoes of that cold, distant wind.””

Please (for Willem Van Spronsen) (https://mediaweb.kirotv.com/document_dev/2019/07/15/Manifesto_15897725_ver1.0.pdf)

What follows is:
there’s wrong and there’s right.

One life –
the flow of commerce
our purpose here?
At your expense,
I go on?

Unshakable injustice
that is me here, clear.
The handmaiden of evil
should be more humane.

Me in these days of fascist hooligans.
Me in these days of highly profitable semantics.
Me in these days of endless yearning.
Me in the name of the state.

Love without a word.
Emma, if I can’t dance,
I don’t want to be

in your revolution,
head in the clouds dreamer,
believe in love, and redemption.
Please believe! We’re going to win,
joyfully. We should be reading.
No more jingo dreams to be fed –
here comes the airplane.
And so we falter and think.
Our dreams fight.

Who benefits? Let me say it again:
I think you are really that good.
As long as love is the foundation,
we are on the same side.
You make me richer.
And you, and you.
I glow by your side.

We are living invisible ascendant.
Pay attention!
Watch me survive and thrive
unabashedly, with open and full
cooperation from the world.

When I was a boy, my head was filled with stories.
I promised myself that I would not become one.
Until one day I said to myself,
“You don’t have to burn the fucker down,
but are you just going to stand by?”

Here’s to trying to make right.
Real freedom and our responsibility to each other.
This is a call to you and everything that you hold sacred.
I know you. I know that
in your hearts it’s time for you,
too, to stand. Pull away the cobwebs
from these bodies pretending to represent us.
I’m not going to fulfill my childhood promise to myself.

Here I am…

yet afraid to show my faces
for fear of the market’s greed.

It was always those with little else to carry
who carried the songs
to Babylon,
to the Mississippi —
some of these last possessed less than nothing
did not own their own bodies
yet, three centuries later,
deep rhythms from Africa,
stowed in their hearts, their bones,
carry the world’s songs.
For those who left my county,
girls from Downings and the Rosses
who followed herring boats north to Shetland
gutting the sea’s silver as they went
or boys from Ranafast who took the Derry boat,
who slept over a rope in a bothy,
songs were their souls’ currency
the pure metal of their hearts,
to be exchanged for other gold,
other songs which rang out true and bright
when flung down
upon the deal boards of their days.

– Moya Cannon

We must not say no to ourselves
When there is a greater deed to do,
If it is not imperative that we should.
We must not say can’t
But we never should really believe that we can’t
Whenever it is for our necessity good.
We must not synchronize with anything less than art-wise
dignity,
It is either that we are natural-constructive-achievers
Or something less than the natural self.
The rendezvous time is here
I see a prophesy:
Across the thunder bridge of time
We rush with lightnin’ feet
To join hands with those,
THE FRIENDS OF SKILL,
Who truly say and truly do.

-Sun Ra

Away Games
by David Berman

So often it’s the unhappy little sounds
city-dwellers make when they’re waiting in line
that sends half of a mind into these
green and black mountain towns
where it’s always January inside the furniture
and even the life of a mushroom
                  can be classified as a performance
to the steady minds that train in frozen parlors
until they’re finally able to recall
each momentary phase of a candleflame
                        as a distinct historical object.

Unlike the larger urban areas,
where saxophone solos appear
as often and unexpectedly
as the devil in Polish fiction,
and where one’s upstairs neighbor
may in fact publish a private newsletter
headlined “Fighting to Get Started Tonight About 8 PM”,
these little towns have no bothersome folklore,
no special customs, and no traditional songs,
unless you count
               the creak of adjoining matter.
These are places where people treat each other with respect.
No one pressures anyone else to dance,
offers unwanted magazine tips
on caring for the swamp-flower of materialism
or tries to say hello to you
                     through a mouthful of blood.

IV (from To Cross This Distance)
by Jamie Saenz

The immense malaise cast by shadows, the melancholic visions surging from the night,
everything terrifying, everything cruel, that without reason, that without name,
one has to take it, who knows why.
If you have nothing to eat but garbage, don’t say a word.
If the garbage makes you sick, don’t say a word.
If they cut off your feet, if they boil your hands, if your tongue rots, if your spine splits in two, if your soul fines down to nothing, don’t say a word.
If they poison you, don’t say a word, even if your bowels slide from your mouth and your hair stands straight up; even if your eyes well with blood, don’t say a word.
If you feel good, don’t feel good. If you fall behind, don’t fall behind. If you die,
don’t die. If you’re sad, don’t be sad. Don’t say a word.
Living is hard; it’s hard work not to say a word.
Putting up with people without saying a word is tough.
It’s very hard—inasmuch as they expect to be understood without saying a word—
to understand people without saying a word.
It’s terribly difficult yet very easy to be a decent person;
the truly difficult thing is not to say a word.

Fourteen Forms of Melancholy

Category Archives: lit